War of the (Ecumenial) Worlds
Peter Kreeft's Ecumenical Jihad
J. Daryl Charles
January 1, 1997
.Several years ago sociologist James Davison Hunter sought to analyze our nation's moral discourse and called for a cooler, more rational approach to our differences over pressing ethical issues--abortion chief among these. Hunter, like Peter Kreeft an academician, seemed to be pleading in a most thoughtful way for an end to the "warfare" metaphor that social conservatives have adopted in their critique of culture. Kreeft, however, will have none of it. The view dispensed in his new book, Ecumenical Jihad, is that we presently stand before a new Dark Age--not the Age of Barbarians, but the Age of Antichrist. Drawing from Augustine's experience watching the demise of Roman culture, Kreeft is convinced that "we are seeing happening here with increasing clarity . . . exactly that spiritual war between 'the City of God' and 'the City of the World' that Augustine detected as the fundamental plot of human history."
This is a disturbing book. The author's provocative title afflicts the comfortable by juxtaposing these two seemingly opposite notions--ecumenism and jihad. Kreeft, a professor of philosophy at Boston College, believes that by the twenty-first century this juxtaposition will not seem strange at all. "We need to realize, first, that we are at war and, second, that the sides have changed radically: many of our former enemies (for example, Muslims) are now our friends, and some of our former friends (for example, humanists) are now our enemies."
The new battle lines as interpreted by Kreeft are becoming clear: the war on earth is more closely resembling the war in heaven. Nothing fantastic, nothing mythical: this spiritual war is understood to be literal, with real casualties--eternal souls as well as the literal blood of ...
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